I previously mentioned the Chumby in our Holiday Gift Guide and have been waiting anxiously for its arrival. Well, that day finally came and I’ve detailed my experience below. If you’re not familiar with the Chumby, it’s a Linux-based gadget that connects up to the internet via WiFi, and sports a squeeze sensor, accelerometer, and a 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen. The coolest part about it is that it runs Adobe Flash-based widgets so pretty much anything you can imagine is (or will be) available for it, and Chumby includes an extensive list at Chumby.com. This whole package comes wrapped up in a nice leather casing, and is actually quite fun to squeeze.

Out of the box
The Chumby ships in a bag, and in that bag is another bag and some charms for personalizing your Chumby. There’s also a great Get Connected guide that walks you through getting started. It’s actually one of the simplest devices I’ve used as far as getting it up and running. You literally plug it in, take the Chumby tour, calibrate the touchscreen, and get connected. Then there are a couple of additional steps, which the guide details, involving setting the time zone, activating the Chumby, and grabbing an update, if available.

{ad} In my case I plugged it in, powered it up, took the tour and then calibrated the screen. The guide mentions that you should use the very tip of your finger or your fingernail (or a stylus) for the greatest accuracy. This is definitely the case, especially when it came to putting in the information required to get the Chumby onto my network. Overall, the touchscreen experience reminded me of a first generation or even beta device. In my experience, if you need a stylus, the device should ship with one.

Activation
The activation is pretty wild and features a grid of ovals. I like the idea, but again the touchscreen proved to be a stumbling block. Also, you’re required to perform the activation from your computer. I can understand why they do this, but I would prefer an internet-enabled device to be able to control the entire experience, including activation.

Once I activated it the Chumby asked if I wanted to grab the latest update. I accepted and about 10 minutes later the Chumby was up and running.

Widgets
On the Chumby site there are tons of widgets available, grouped into a variety of categories. You can also create different channels and put the widgets into them. Before I realized this I loaded up more than 60 widgets into a channel. Later, I figured I could easily move some to a new channel but that’s not the case. This is definitely a feature I’d like to see available in the future as I’m now sitting with about 50 widgets in one channel since I haven’t had the time to re-add the widgets to another channel. I also found customizing a widget to be cumbersome. For example, I wanted to customize the weather and Picasa widgets but had to go back to my computer to do the customizing. Since it’s internet-enabled it could have very easily been a couple of keystrokes on the Chumby.

Here’s the Chumby Control Panel. You access it by pressing the top of the Chumby

This widget cycles through your favorite stocks

See what’s selling on Woot!

What’s your sign?

You also have the ability to share your widgets with other Chumby owners, directly from the device by hitting the send icon. Since I’m the only Chumby owner I know, I couldn’t send any of my widgets to a “chum”, as a friend is known in chumbyland. You also have the ability to rate the widget and even click stay, which keeps that widget on the screen at all times.

If you don’t “stay” a widget, the chumby will rotate through all of the widgets in your channel. The stay feature is cool, though, especially when combined with customized channels. For example, I could make a clocks channel, which features nothing but clocks and have it either stay on a clock or cycle through a bunch of them.

I also added additional widgets from the website but it wasn’t clear to me how long it would be before the Chumby connected and updated so I cycled the power on the Chumby. After it finished restarting and connected back up to the internet, it was now displaying the new widgets.

Here’s a screen shot of the widgets configuration screen on Chumby.com

Other ports
The Chumby also features two USB ports and a headphone jack. For now you can plug in your iPod and through the control panel on the Chumby, you can choose music and then listen to your iPod. As of this writing, it doesn’t support the iPhone, though. As for the headphone jack, it’s standard size so just plug in your favorite headphones. One widget I haven’t seen yet is an internet radio streamer, but I’m sure that’s coming soon. I also saw that a future accessory is a USB drive so I can only imagine what they have planned for the USB ports.

Conclusion
So far it’s a nice piece of gadgetry to have around. I’ve been enjoying letting it auto-cycle through a bunch of channels including Woot!, Google News, and others, and occasionally I lookup to see what the Panda at the zoo is doing, which is always fun. I also find myself occasionally playing one of the many Flash-lite based games around, so it’s a key tool for any procrastinator. I could also imagine using it as a reminder tool or alarm clock and even having it cycle through my pictures on Picasa. The possibilities are definitely endless.

Price
As for the price, I think for what it does $179.95 is a bit too high. I showed it to a fellow gadget-lover who remarked, “I’ll wait for it to hit Woot!” I think when it officially releases, selling for around $99 would make them fly off the shelves. That said, it’s a hackers dream come true, so less than $200 isn’t too bad if that’s your target market.

Cons
– Unfortunately, the Chumby has to be plugged into an AC outlet to work. I found this to be a major con and would have preferred a rechargeable battery.
– The Chumby only works with the iPod, and not even the iPhone. Why not give it the option to pass through audio?
– If you want to add or customize a widget, you have to do this via the computer, and not the Chumby. Why not have the Chumby offer the ability to customize.
– The touchscreen is not the best. I’d prefer the Chumby either shipping with a better screen and/or including a stylus.

Reader Comments

what4

I chat with their support and confirmed that it does not support aac or aacplus, so watch out!!!

scuba

*** REVIEW ERROR ***

<p class=”MsoNormal”>While the review is correct that the available set of widgets from Chumby.com does not include an internet radio streamer, that is because the Chumby has that functionality built into the control panel.

<p class=”MsoNormal”> Just look at the picture of the control panel that appears above.<span> </span>See the button that reads "MUSIC"?<span> </span>Click it.<span> </span>You will end up on a screen that lets you play music from a number of sources, including:
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- Shoutcast
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- Radio Free Chumby
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- An iPod (but not an iPhone or iTouch since those devices cannot be mounted as a file system like previous iPods)
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- A set of local MP3s on a USB stick placed into the back of the Chumby.
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>And probably other sources that I cannot recall at the moment (my Chumby is at home)…and this is all out of the box with no hacking.<span> </span>The set of available streaming radio stations is massive.<span> </span>I typed in "NPR" in the search box and saw dozens of results.
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>BTW, not only can you play these music sources from this interface in the control panel, but you can also exit and start the widget stream again in a channel while the radio station continues to play.<span> </span>Heck, you can even use one of these streams as an alarm.<span> </span>I currently wake up to my favorite NPR station out of Boston…and I live in Washington, DC.
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>If you are a hacker, you can SSH into the device and do far more…including playing from a SAMBA file share.
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>The challenge to marketing this device is that it does not just do one thing.<span> </span>They should market it as an alarm clock radio…even though it is so much more…and people may then start to get it.<span> </span>In that capacity, it also rocks.<span> </span>My wife's alarm wakes her up with the sound of waves (a local MP3)…and supports a snooze duration that we configured for her (10 minutes).<span> </span>When she finally hits "alarm off", the screen changes to her news feed, starting with local weather and then headlines from Google.<span> </span>The Chumby then wakes me up later using a 15 minutes snooze interval (my choice) and the aforementioned NPR station.<span> </span>When I finally hit alarm off, it shows me my morning stream, which consists of:
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- local weather
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- my google calendar
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- pending email
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- baseball scores
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- google news
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- ny times headlines
<p class=”MsoNormal”>- slashdot
<p class=”MsoNormal”>Later, it changes back to clock mode…and eventually kicks to news mode again in the evening…finally going to a darker sleep mode automatically about the time that we normally go to bed…and I am not even scratching the surface of what this thing can do…or what you can program it to do.
<p class=”MsoNormal”>
<p class=”MsoNormal”>Nice review, but it really misses the boat with regards to streaming.

scuba

hmmm…lots of ?s in there. They should be carriage returns. My bad for pasting into a program to check for spelling errors. ;-)

scuba

wow…I guess this site does not like firefox…or has an "insecure" servlet filter configured, which turns all of my assertions into questions :-)

Hi Folks,Before any of you take up the advice of the previous poster, note the name and check out who is behind international-orders.com. I and an apparently increasing number of ‘customers’ of international-orders.com are experiencing problems getting refunds after they inexplicably cancelled orders.I will come back here to update this site if they refund me, even if they respond to my emails would be nice.good luck,c.

Judy

I have a chumby and I wanted to use it as an alarm. But unfortunately it went from working to play music in the morning to slowly deterorating to only playing the default beep (which it does when it can’t access pandora or shoutcast). Working with their complaint guys is a night mare. Rather than after a few complaints, having you send back the unit, it is sort of like the gig from the IT guy where the help desk guy plays a recording “Is is plugged in, have you turned it off and on etc”. So far I’ve downloaded a second beta test software, and sent them readings from where it is located and all other wireless devices in the room work fine in that area. Then they asked me to test the alarm in the room with the router, which I did, and now they are asking I retest in the room with the router for signal strength. When I first bought this it more or less worked but has stopped functioning well over the few months I’ve owned it. I really try to support new innovation, but their support really is bad.